James Gosling's Surprise Announcement at Devoxx: Amazon Corretto

The attendee’s of Devoxx Belgium got quite the surprise today as the founder of Java James Gosling made a surprise appearance and announcement during the keynotes of the conference.

So what did he announce? The new project of Amazon’s called ‘Amazon Corretto’.

Corretto is a new completely free distribution of the OpenJDK from Amazon, which works across multiple platforms (Linux, Windows, macOS and Docker) which now has preview builds available for you to test.

So why does this matter? Well as shown in Oracle’s support roadmap, once a Java version reaches its “End of Public Updates” (the first 6 months), any of the additional updates will only be available to it’s commercial users. Now though this doesn’t sound great at first glance, they have made sure that OpenJDK is as interchangeable as possible so that switching out a JDK is an easy process.

The plan moving forward is that OpenJDK will have different distributions who are maintained by different people, and Corretto is Amazons distribution. Another example would be Azul’s Zulu. These distributions are able to provide their own support, but most importantly they will be updating the JDKs for the full LTS duration, and all for free.

James also wanted to make a few things clear about Corretto:

Unlike some ventures with Amazon, collaboration will be a focus. Any patches that are added onto their distribution will go upstream and be available for others. “Redhat and others” were the companies listed on who they will be working with on the update process.
Despite being labeled as the preview, Corretto is what amazon runs on for it’s Java processes.
Releases are planned on a quarterly schedule, however any essential patches will be made where necessary.
If you have any questions, feel free to post them with the hash tag #Corretto on twitter for answers.

You can see James talk in the keynote available on the Devoxx YouTube (timestamp of 55:30):